While most sinks have at least a common basket strainer to catch food debris from going down the drain, such baskets are able to catch many food fragments which can safely pass down a drain, along with larger pieces that should not. The basket requires manual removal and shaking of the basket contents into compost or garbage containers. Some kitchen proprietors elect to have a garbage or food "disposal" which can fragment all matter to a flushable size.
A number of food disposal devices are known to allow food material to be safely reduced to fragment size which can be carried through household plumbing to larger sewage conduits. In the post World War II period there was an upsurge of electrically powered food "disposal" units to be attached at the base of a sink. Besides requiring assurance of separation of electrical components from moisture, the many electrically powered disposals purposely keep rotors out of reach of hands. The out of sight out of mind context of rotors, also means that these are not available to view for cleaning or inspection and guards must be placed to avoid losing hard objects into the disposal where these damaging objects cannot be easily retrieved.
The plethora of electrically powered devices in a modern kitchen may mean that mechanical assists have been overlooked by inventors for those in the kitchen who continue to prefer a given task in the manual mode. Yet, many households do not have sink disposals and the ever-clogged baskets of the average sink must be diligently cleaned. A few of the ergonomic disadvantages of operating the simple device of a common basket are:
1. When a basket is overwhelmed with food particles it must be stirred manually, keeping particles suspended, so that a filled sink can be drained. Stirring does not physically send all particles down the drain, but only suspends them temporarily allowing temporary fluid drainage. The task of stirring is simple but tedious, with the fingers or some piece of kitchen ware as the tool.
2. Once a sink is drained, the basket allows inspection of food debris, but food particles are adherent because of surface tension of the wet, flexible, and soggy matter. To empty the contents into a garbage container, the user may tap the basket upside down or wipe it with fingers or cloth. Even then, the experienced dishwasher knows the need of having to rinse small adherent particles in a spray and of flushing the lower drain assembly, which the basket was meant to protect.
3. It is easy to procrastinate in flushing away small adherent food particles only to allow sugars and nutrients to be leached onto the sink and drain surfaces where the growth of fungus films is the result.
The above problems are not associated only with large quantities or large sized pieces of food debris, and the problems are known even to those kitchen operators who diligently scrape and prepare dishware for the process of washing. Both the diligent "scrapers", who do not feel compelled to own a "disposal", and the disposal owner, who has a second sink lacking the device, encounter the everyday task of removing small amounts of food debris from a sink.